How Paul and James Use the Righteousness Word Family

Our Sunday morning class has been working through the letter of James, and before we go further into the letter itself I wanted us to stop and look at something underneath it.

James and Paul both use the Greek word family behind our English word "righteousness." Anyone who has read Romans 4 and James 2 side by side has felt the friction. Paul says Abraham was justified by faith. James says Abraham was justified by works. Whole libraries have been written on that pair of sentences.

I am not going to settle the question here. What I want to do is something simpler and, I think, more useful. I want to look at the words themselves, because a good deal of the difficulty dissolves once you see how wide this family is and which member each writer reaches for.

This grew out of a broader survey I did of the eighty-six New Testament verses containing δικαιοσύνη, which is posted separately as Righteousness in the New Testament. Having finished that, I thought, perhaps I should widen the review to include the related words as well.

First, a small correction to the survey

In the King James Version, almost every occurrence of the English noun "righteousness" translates the Greek noun δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē). There are only a few notable exceptions, and I want to name them, because they matter.

• Romans 5:18, "by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men." The Greek is δικαίωμα (dikaiōma), Strong's G1345. Many modern translations read "one righteous act."
• Romans 8:4, "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us." Again δικαίωμα. Many translate "the righteous requirement of the law."
• Revelation 19:8, "the fine linen is the righteousness of saints." Here it is the plural δικαιώματα. Many translate "the righteous deeds of the saints."

That is a real shift in emphasis. Δικαιοσύνη describes righteousness as a quality, a state, or a standing. Δικαίωμα describes a righteous act, a righteous requirement, an ordinance, or a judicial verdict. Three verses that many of us have quoted as statements about righteousness as a condition are, in the Greek, statements about something done or something required.

The whole family

Once you start pulling on the thread, the family is larger than most of us were taught.

Greek	Strong's	Typical meaning
δίκη (dikē)		justice, judgment
δίκαιος (dikaios)	G1342	righteous, just (adjective)
δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē)	G1343	righteousness (noun)
δικαιόω (dikaioō)	G1344	to justify, to declare righteous (verb)
δικαίωμα (dikaiōma)	G1345	righteous act, righteous requirement, ordinance
δικαίωσις (dikaiōsis)	G1347	justification, acquittal

All of them grow from the same root, δικ-, whose basic idea is justice, rightness, or what accords with God's standard.

There is a small spelling point worth clearing up as well. Δικαιοσύνη is the noun. The verb is δικαιόω, usually transliterated dikaioō rather than simply dikaio. They are closely related and they are not the same part of speech.

Noun and verb: two different questions

The noun δικαιοσύνη describes a quality, a condition, or a state. It answers the question, what is righteousness?

• "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness" (Matthew 5:6). Believers long for God's righteous character and will.
• "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness" (Matthew 6:33). The noun describes God's righteous rule and character.
• "Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ" (Romans 3:22). Paul speaks of the righteousness God provides through faith.
• "The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God" (James 1:20). Human anger does not produce the kind of righteous living God desires.

The verb δικαιόω answers a different question altogether: what does God do, or what action takes place?

• "Being justified freely by his grace" (Romans 3:24). God justifies sinners.
• "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God" (Romans 5:1). God declares believers righteous.
• "But wisdom is justified of all her children" (Luke 7:35). Here the sense is shown to be right.
• "Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?" (James 2:21). James uses the verb in the sense of shown, vindicated, demonstrated to be righteous.

Read those last two together. Luke 7:35 uses the verb to mean vindicated, proved right by the outcome. James 2:21 uses it the same way. That is not a stray usage James invented for his argument. It is one of the ordinary things this verb does in Greek.

An English illustration

If the Greek is unfamiliar, try an English family. Beauty, beautiful, beautify. Noun, adjective, verb. The same root doing three different jobs.

Now do it with our subject. Justice, just, justify. Righteousness, righteous, declare righteous.

Nobody is confused when a man says a verdict was just and also says the court justified the defendant. We understand that one word describes a quality and the other describes an action. The relationship is simple enough: God justifies people so that they possess righteousness.

Paul's use

Paul often moves through the entire word family, sometimes in a single stretch of argument. Romans 3 through 5 contains all of these ideas.

God is δίκαιος, righteous. God grants δικαιοσύνη, righteousness. God δικαιόω, justifies, sinners. The result is δικαίωσις, justification.

These words form the theological backbone of Paul's explanation of salvation by grace through faith. When Paul reaches for this family, he is usually answering the question that drives Romans: how does a sinner come to be right with God?

James's use

James uses the same family somewhat differently. His governing question is not primarily how a sinner becomes righteous before God. He asks something else: what does genuine righteousness look like in everyday life?

So James emphasizes righteous conduct, righteous speech, righteous wisdom, and works that demonstrate faith. For James, true δικαιοσύνη is visible in a transformed life. And δικαιόω, especially in James 2, carries the weight of genuine faith being shown or vindicated by obedient works.

Complementary rather than contradictory

Here is where I land, and I want to state it carefully, because good and godly people have divided over this.

Paul and James use the same Greek word family with different emphases. Paul focuses on God's act of declaring sinners righteous through faith. James focuses on the evidence that such faith is real. Read each writer in his own context, attending to his own question, and these emphases are complementary rather than contradictory.

I want to be honest that saying so does not dissolve every difficulty. There are still real questions about how the two men would have answered each other, and about what James knew of Paul's letters. I have not resolved those, and I am not sure I am able to.

But a great deal of the apparent contradiction rests on assuming that a shared vocabulary must mean an identical question. It need not. When Luke can use δικαιόω to mean vindicated and Paul can use it to mean acquitted, we should not be surprised when James uses it in the first sense while Paul is using it in the second.

What I take away

The same thing I take away from nearly every word study I attempt. Watch the part of speech. Watch the author. Watch the question he is answering. And hold your conclusions loosely enough that the text can correct them.

Two men, one word family, two questions, one gospel.

A companion study listing all eighty-six verses in the KJV and NLT, with the Greek word and its meaning in context for each one, is available as a downloadable resource in the library.